I was growing antsy, not really wanting to stick around for the emotional climax, especially because I knew my mother didn’t speak a word of Spanish beyond “gracias” and she didn’t understand a darn thing of what the nuns were telling her.
They were telling her that they were at capacity with children to care for, and could barely afford to provide three meals a day. Their laundry room needed new washers and dryers, and they were constantly in despair over how to handle a situation with the local waste management company about their trash pick-up. Naturally, caring for more than one hundred babies and toddlers, they produced a lot of trash in the way of diapers, and some systems in Colombia were still very corrupt. Waste management was one of them, and the nuns were being pressured to pay increasingly steep bribes to companies to pick up garbage. All of this I gathered from what they told my mother in Spanish.
I thought grimly of the mid-term I had probably just failed as I picked at my cuticles. Take that, Spanish II.
I felt a finger tap me on the shoulder. It was Tim, carrying a soccer ball. He motioned for me to follow him and I let one of the burly production assistants in the hallway know that I was going outside.
Out on the field, Tim called in Spanish to a group of ten or so boys and girls ranging in age from eight to twelve. We split the group into two teams of six and Tim and I played as goalies. For an hour, we led the kids in an impromptu game of soccer, with Tim hopelessly trying to enforce official rules in Spanish upon kids who were having a great time and just didn’t care if they were off-sides. I laughed every time I missed a kick and Tim’s team scored; I was a terrible goalie but my own team didn’t seem to care, and I was getting a punishing sunburn.
“Grace! What on God’s green earth are you doing out here?” Mama yelled.
I bashfully exited the game, asking a tall boy named Javiar to stand in for me as I trotted off the field to where my mother stood, hands on hips, on the path leading from the parking lot into the building.
Mama privately scolded me in a hushed voice for going outside without Abe or Karl to keep watch, but luckily her attention was quickly absorbed by a small tear in her white Azzedine Alaia slacks.
We said long, drawn-out goodbyes to the nuns and to Tim and Chris and the other volunteers, and several of the kids with whom I had played soccer crushed me in desperate, emotional embraces.
“Adios,” a pot-bellied boy named Martin said, his voice cracking as if he were about to cry.
“Thanks for playing with the kids, Grace. That was real sweet of you,” Tim said to me, shaking my hand. “You have no idea what it means to them for an outsider to come and be a part of their world for a day.”
Judging from the tears rolling down Martin’s cheeks because I was leaving, I think I had some idea. I was sad to be leaving the orphanage so soon. I wondered if the check my mother had written was really going to be enough for the nuns to keep the operation running for another year and what would happen to those little kids if it wasn’t enough. I vowed that I would write letters and send treats back to this happy little place once I got back to Treadwell. I imagined Martin opening a letter from me and wondered if he’d even remember my name in two weeks.
In the car on the way back to the hotel I wondered aloud if Mama and Daddy would ever consider adopting a baby from a place like Colombia. Mama had cooed and giggled at each baby she lifted into her arms in the nursery, kissing them on their soft heads and tickling toddlers on their chubby knees.
“Oh, Grace, I’m far too busy to run after a baby,” she insisted. “You and your brother were such a handful, I can’t even imagine going through all of that again now that I’m fifteen years older.”
I fell quiet. For just a few moments I had allowed myself to imagine how fun it would be to have a baby in the house when I came home to visit. Mama was hardly too old to care for a small child; she was only forty-five.
“Besides,” she continued, “it won’t be long before you and Aaron have babies of your own.”
Her words, almost like a sinister prophecy, rang in my ears all the way back across the dry Colombian landscape to our hotel in the city.
Chapter 4
The morning after I arrived back on the Treadwell campus from Colombia, I was exhausted and in a terrible mood. Our flight to Phoenix from Colombia had been extremely delayed, so late that we spent an extra night in Bogota and I had to fly directly from Colombia to Boston. Mama had been tense and in a very coarse mood at the airport after talking to Daddy in private. She was walking in circles, pacing all night. After we arrived back at the hotel to check in for an additional night’s sleep, she closed the door behind herself when she went into the suite’s bedroom to continue her conversation with Daddy, which I had assumed (incorrectly) to have been about the progress on the holiday special.
There wasn’t time for me to stop back at home in Phoenix to retrieve my luggage there, or to take True out for one last ride, or to do a single cannonball into the pool. Mama said she would ship the contents of my Burberry suitcase to me at school.
I cared less about the underwear and shorts I had left in Phoenix and more that I had been denied the day of relaxation at home I had been counting on. Instead of spending one day decompressing in my own quiet bedroom, I went straight from the long lines and chaos of the airport in Bogota to my empty, stale-smelling room at Colgate. Someone, presumably Lauren, had boxed up the rest of Juliette’s belongings. Without all of her cute incense burners and Indian scarves hanging from the ceiling, the room was just a plain old ugly dorm room again. It was depressing, and a cold reminder of Juliette’s absence.
It was Sunday afternoon and I had Biology class bright and early at 8:35 the next morning. My new roommate, whoever she was, had yet to arrive. After transferring all of the clothes from the suitcase that our housekeeping staff in Phoenix had packed for my trip to Colombia directly into my laundry bag, I checked my e-mail for the first time in a week.
And this was where my spiraling journey into a new world began.
Truthfully, the journey had begun at some point on the trip to Colombia, where Mama’s inability to speak Spanish and disinterest in learning had started to ruffle my feathers. Although I hadn’t admitted it to myself during the moments when it was happening, her obliviousness to the true plight of the people we were assisting in Colombia had made me ashamed. More than once during our trip I had wondered to myself, even just for a fleeting moment, how charitable my mother really was in her heart if she was unwilling to adopt a baby in need even though we had ample resources to raise it. At a children’s hospital on our last day in Bogota, we met a little girl born with a heart defect who was five years old. She carried a respirator around with her everywhere, which was heartbreaking, and her doctors told us that an operation to fix her condition would cost a figure of eleven thousand dollars, which was unimaginable to her working-class parents.
I had wondered to myself in that moment how much Daddy’s birthday gift to himself, parked in our garage in Phoenix, had cost.
I knew for a fact that my mother had pairs of earrings worth far more than eleven thousand dollars.
So, I didn’t know it as I opened my e-mail inbox, but I was already on an irreversible trajectory into the unknown.
I had an e-mail response from Aaron. Only, the subject line of his e-mail was not in reply to that which I had sent him the previous week before the trip to Colombia.
The subject line was one word: Trouble.
My heart began racing as the e-mail loaded on the screen of my laptop.
Dear Grace,
By the time you get back from Colombia and read this e-mail, you may have already heard, but I am in some big trouble. I want you to hear the facts straight from me, because I know Mama and Daddy are not going to understand any of this at all, and they’re probably going to be really angry. I met a girl during orientation in August. I thought I knew her really well and was in love with her, and I guess I made some bad choices. Then she also made a bad choice,
a really bad choice, without telling me, and her parents are taking all of it to the tabloids. I have really made a mess of my life, and I am afraid that I have really screwed things up for Mama and Daddy.
I stopped reading and reached for my cell phone. I immediately began a psychotic multi-tasking hunt for information. In the same browser window in which I had been reading Aaron’s e-mail, I typed in the web address of CNN. I simultaneously dialed Aaron’s cell phone on speed dial while searching the CNN homepage for any mention of Aaron or my parents. Aaron’s voice-mail picked up.
“Aaron, it’s Grace. I just got your e-mail. Call me,” I said.
Then my brain clicked and I remembered that Aaron had written that the girl’s parents were going to take the story to the tabloids. CNN wasn’t exactly a tabloid. I went to a gossip website and saw something lower on the page, as if the news had broken the previous day and had been pushed lower by stories about celebrity stints in rehab and an accident on a reality TV show. There it was, a headline that made me shiver:
Boarding School Co-ed in Televangelist Abortion Scandal!
My phone rang at that very moment before I could read the article and jump to my own conclusions. It was Aaron. He sounded tired and hoarse.
“Hi,” he said.
“Aaron, what is going on?” I asked, careful to not sound accusatory.
He took a deep breath. Our phone connection was terrible; I heard a great deal of background noise and static.
“I messed up, Gracie,” his voice faltered, as if he were about to cry – but that couldn’t be right, Aaron was my older brother, he wouldn’t cry – and he continued, “really badly.”
“I met this girl at in the beginning of August when I came back to Massachusetts. We were doing volunteer work at Hampton Beach, just cleaning up end-of-summer debris on the boardwalk. She was really pretty, and from Connecticut. We went to a music festival together and once I got to know her better, I really wanted her to be my girlfriend. I thought we had a lot in common. I mean, I really thought I was in love with her.”
As he spoke, my eyes ran up and down the story on the website. It was accompanied by a picture of a teenage girl walking through a parking lot who was holding up a newspaper to cover her face. All that could be seen of her was a slim torso and long blond hair.
“So you know, we started having, a, uh, relationship,” Aaron continued.
I was having a hard time processing all of this. It was totally strange for me to think that Aaron had been having sex with a girl since the beginning of the school year, if that was indeed what he was implying. Mama and Daddy were absolutely and completely against pre-marital sex. Every time the subject of dating ever came up in conversation throughout our childhoods, our parents would interject that sex was for married couples and of course, they were expecting that we would wait until holy matrimony.
“Then, at the end of September she called me at school and said she was in trouble. She was like, pretty sure she was pregnant. She and her roommate went to a drug store and got a home pregnancy test and it was coming up positive. I still don’t know how… I thought we’d been really careful,” Aaron muttered. “Anyway, of course I told her I loved her and wanted to do the right thing.”
“Aaron,” I interrupted him. “You’re only seventeen.”
“Yeah, but so what? Mama and Daddy were only twenty-two when they got married. I was in love with Heather, Gracie. I was ready to marry her,” Aaron insisted. “But she told me it was too late. She already had an appointment at an abortion clinic. There wasn’t anything I could say to change her mind. She said she just wanted me to know what I’d done.”
He paused for a moment.
The hand holding my cell phone to my ear felt frozen. This could not be happening. I thought about how my brother might have been on his way toward fatherhood if things had happened differently. I’d be an aunt. Mama would be a granny.
“She laughed at me. She thought it was dumb that I was asking her to get married. She said her parents would like, totally kill her if they found out about her getting knocked up. She thought it was childish of me to think that we could get married just because it was the right thing to do in the eyes of the Lord.”
I could barely breathe, I was so terrified. Now everything was making sense. Aaron’s lack of responsiveness all semester, his refusal to come with to Colombia. He had obviously had quite a catastrophe on his hands.
“It was just crazy. I’ve only know her for three months and already all this has happened. And we talked about getting married before she got pregnant, so I don’t know why all of that went out of the window the moment it started to matter. I didn’t know what to do,” Aaron continued. “It wasn’t like I could sue her to keep the baby alive. I didn’t know where her appointment was booked or when it was going to happen. She didn’t even want me to come with to hold her hand. I didn’t think I was ever going to hear from her again. All I could do was tell her that I respected her decision and would love her no matter what.”
“Then she called me crying about two weeks later. Somehow, her parents had found out about everything. She told them the whole story, and as soon as she mentioned my name, her father hit the roof. They’re supporters of The Church of the Spirit. Her parents cannot believe that the son of Chuck Mathison could be responsible for such a thing.”
Honestly, I couldn’t believe it, either. But I believed my brother about his intentions to marry this girl, Heather. Aaron had never been a liar. My brother had always been one of the best-intentioned people I had ever known. He loved children. He wanted to spend his whole life taking care of children.
“Do Mama and Daddy know?” I asked carefully.
A chunk of static cut him off for a few seconds and then I heard him mid-sentence. “…I’m pretty sure Heather’s parents have already gotten a lawyer and are planning to sue Mama and Daddy. That’s what she said they were going to do, anyway.”
“Sue them?” I asked, outraged. “For what?”
Aaron was quiet for a few moments before he responded, “For murder. They’re claiming that I told Heather to get the abortion and that I’m responsible for the baby’s death.”
With those words, I felt like I had just tumbled headfirst off a cliff and no amount of scrambling backwards was going to put me safely back onto the ledge. As far-fetched legally as their accusation sounded, it was exactly the kind of claim that could destroy my father’s entire following. And poor, naïve Aaron had walked right into what sounded like a trap. A girl who was too scared to tell her parents the truth about what had happened was going to let our family roast in the headlines.
The hair on the back of my neck suddenly stood on end.
“What does Daddy say?” I asked.
Aaron said that our father had called him the previous night after his office fielded a call from some law firm in Connecticut on Friday afternoon. When the conversation began, Daddy was under the assumption that the lawyer who had called was a crackpot and he was curious to find out if Aaron knew anything about the situation described in the message that the lawyer had left. Aaron had taken a deep breath and told Daddy the truth from beginning to end, that he was guilty as charged for getting Heather pregnant, but that he had never under any circumstances encouraged her to terminate the pregnancy.
I was starting to thank my lucky stars that our flight from Bogota to Phoenix had been delayed, or I would have landed in Arizona with my mother the night before, directly in the eye of the storm. Now her erratic behavior our last night in Bogota made sense; she was having a world-class freak-out. As close as I was with Mama, I knew deep down that Aaron was her star. He was good-looking with my father’s sandy blond hair and strong jaw, athletic and charming. When he was a little boy she used to beam at him and call him her “little man.”
According to Aaron, our parents were beyond furious.
Daddy had disowned him.
Aaron wasn’t sure if it was the premarital sex part, or the abortion part that had earne
d our father’s anger, but Daddy had uttered the words, “you are no son of mine, and you are no longer welcome in my house.”
He had already left his boarding school and was on a train.
I was crying, listening to him, and wasn’t sure when the tears had started falling. It was like someone had turned the lights out on my entire universe.
“I need to see you,” Aaron said. “I’m leaving and I’m not sure what’s going to happen next.”
Everything seemed to be happening very quickly. I became aware, suddenly, of girls’ voices outside my door in the hallway and realized that probably everyone at Treadwell already knew about my family scandal. The moment I stepped outside my dorm room, I was going to be an absolute social pariah. I tried to remember if anyone had acted strangely toward me on my way up to my room earlier in the day but my head was spinning and I couldn’t recall.
My breathing was growing erratic. I knew Aaron wasn’t just asking me to meet him in Boston. He was asking me to run away with him. To leave everything behind and face whatever was ahead of us together. I had never been forced to make such a monumental decision on my own before. Leaving Treadwell and never returning was one thing; it would be an unexpected change, but life would go on. Leaving Mama and Daddy and never seeing my bedroom again or Colby McKay, and worst of all – leaving True Heart – how could I just step away from my life and close the door behind me?
“Aaron, let me call you back,” I said.
My voice did not even sound like it was coming from my body.
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